The Icon

Implementation

Further Ideas and Thoughts

Cooking

Using "Recipes" as an electronic cookbook in the kitchen, while cooking. This situation has some special requirements.

"Messy hands" - difficult to type / manipulate the computer screen. Screen blanking is a major annoyance when cooking using recipe websites. Scrolling could be somehow easier too. Voice commands? Automatic scrolling by following pointer movement? Could accessibility framework help somehow?

"Messy working space" - the computer (laptop? laptop-tablet hybrid? something with a touch screen?) needs to be a bit farther away, so the recipe could be displayed with a larger font? Display the ingredients and instructions side by side, try to avoid scrolling if you can while keeping some sane minimum font size.

"Crap, did I already add salt?" - it could display simple checklist-style checkboxes for ingredients you already added.

"Bring to boil, and cook for 5 minutes" - include a simple egg timer with countdown and elapsed time.

"Make this double" should work in the "kitchen mode" as well. It should use sensible units for this. Would be rad if it could say "one cup and three tablespoons" instead of 1.2394 cups. Because, how do you find that 0.2394th of a cup when your cream sauce is burning? Or – the unthinkable – if your rental cottage kitchen is in Europe and has only metric measuring cups (or the other way around)?

"How many grams is 3dl of sugar?" - could have a simple dropdown to select any unit you want if you click / tap the unit name. Sometimes you have a scale to measure weights, sometimes you have metric cups, sometimes you have imperial / US measurement cups. Usually something different than the person who wrote the recipe.

Shopping

Add the ingredients of selected recipes to something like Google Keep, Owncloud or some other online services. You can avoid printing the list, and a mobile shopping list app might make it easy to tick items as you pick stuff up at the store.

Future possibilities might include adding a shopping list to online delivery / grocery pickup services, if such API's start to be more widespread and standard.

Browsing

It would be cool for recipes to be somewhat 'date-aware'. That could include several things:

Let me sort recipes by last modified date or by last cooked date. This would probably be best in a list view. It would let me answer questions like: What did I cook last week, last month, or when Christian was over in May ?

A week before a special occasion (e.g. hanukka or mid summer night), start featuring recipes that are marked for that occasion